Archive for July 2011

Dr. Christine Hall, an experienced emergency room physician, released a report earlier this month detailing her findings from a study of incidents when the police interact in a violent manner with the public.
You likely haven’t heard of Dr. Hall or her study. The bulk of the mainstream media ignored her largely because she found that despite all the interactions police have with members of the public, less than one tenth of one percent turned violent and in most instances the police are restrained in their response and do not use excessive force. And unfortunately, supporting the police, for the most part, is not what is done in the mainstream media. It’s unseemly. After all, the police keep secrets from them. They must be covering something up.
Oh dear, whatever will David Eby of the BC Civil Liberties Association do now? His delusional perception that all police are jack-booted enforcers of the Establishment has been – horrors – wrong!
Eby is still perplexed why there haven’t been any complaints to his organization about police brutality during the Stanley Cup riot of June 15. Hint: the police were very restrained and the knobs weren’t. Most of Vancouver wished the VPD might have been a little less than professional and would have got some societal payback for every embarrassing waste of good oxygen who took part in that shameful event.
But the VPD, as an organization, is made up of professional men and women who want to help society, to make a difference.
Dr. Hall, now based in Victoria, examined hundreds of thousands of interactions between the police and the public over the past four years. She identified fewer than 1,200 incidents of use of force among 1.8 million police-public interactions. She says the vast majority of the incidents when police had to use force involved people who were drunk, mentally disturbed, or violent in their own actions toward the police.
The reality is that people are the authours of their own misfortune in the vast majority of cases and Dr. Hall’s study shows exactly that. The police are not society’s enemy. They protect us under the most trying of circumstances and every time they are forced to be violent they have to listen to the bleating of fools.
And the mainstream media dutifully record every syllable while Dr. Hall is largely ignored.